Let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist
Today’s Oxford and Cambridge boat race will, for the first time, see women of the two universities permitted to race on the same course as the men and on the same day in front of a live television audience.
This is a step forward for gender equality and another blow to patriarchal assumptions that women are too ‘delicate’ for such sporting endeavours. As recently as 1962 the captain of Selwyn College at Cambridge wrote to the university’s women’s boat club to chastise them for perpetrating something that was “a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous”.
But let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist. We should all welcome the levelling of the playing field between men and women, but the next step is for Oxford and Cambridge – and by extension the boat race – to open themselves up more fully to those from non-privileged backgrounds.
Just one in 10 children who attend either Oxford or Cambridge are entitled to free school meals – compared with a fifth of children in Britain as a whole. A quick glance at some of the surnames which still dominate at Oxford makes the same point in a slightly different way. According to a 2013 study by the London School of Economics, a disproportionately large number of places at Oxford were taken up by people with Norman Conquest surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery.
This isn’t because a Norman surname is a sign of super intelligence; it’s because we live in a society where class privilege cascades down the generations like a tennis ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. More young people from the London borough of Richmond attend Oxford and Cambridge than from the entire city of Birmingham.
And so as much as today’s boat race may be a victory for gender equality, we should not ignore the class inequalities that persist at our top universities – and in society more generally – in a fit of liberal hubris. As I’ve written a number of times, equality isn’t a state of affairs that is half upper middle class women and half upper middle class men.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
75 Responses to “Hurrah for boat race gender equality. Now what about class?”
Guest
“JEWS RUIN EVERYTHING”
Nope, I don’t “sign in” as guest, you’re ignorant as usual. And right, until you’ve purged the country of Jews, there’s no point getting *serious* about your pogroms.
Of course you want to deny the 99% “complexity”. Like a functional economy, where people can cross borders. And sandwiches, apparently. As you blame the Other for there being far, far too little poor worker bedsits, and far too many jobs for them – that eeeevil trade!
As you quote a hate program designed for political effect. As you spew the old lies about the poor struggling to find money to eat and have shelter, who you are spreading your myths about.
Guest
No, not for your 1%. Shame about everyone else.
You remain a little shit, that’s nothing to do with kids and everything to do with your views towards the 99%. And you call violence an answer, right, supporting child abuse. You want more poorly educated adults, as people who are afraid cannot learn properly.
The “problem” you see is, again, not allowing child abuse in schools. Period.
Guest
Nope, I don’t share your bigotry, sadly for you.
As you make wild claims about where I got my degree – which was from Salford – I worked-as-in-did-a-job in Oxford, you can’t accept that because you hate me for being Jewish, blah blah, as you say I must have been you – nope!
You support higher wages for your 1% “true” workers, and lowering prices
for them. Kicking out all foreigners, but not *your* leeches, etc. – you’re not fooling me, of course, as you’ve called for blocking trade and investment and isolating the UK – which isn’t in the interest of even most rich people.
I call you Rich White Man, as you’re arguing from privilege, with no idea about the poor. That’s not the same as saying “white people bad”, whereas you say “Jewish people bad” on a regular basis, when you’re in Hamas-support mode.
Guest
And no, you do the same on Spiked, of course, don’t bother with the excuses.
terence patrick hewett
The Boat Race has no second prize; when you lose you lose everything. It shows us how to deal with failure and then come back to win; no small lesson. The trick of life is to try and win more than you lose.